Music made with Love

It's been a tough year for Australia's first family of rock'n'roll, but a lot of love and a rabble of grandkids have seen Jimmy and Jane Barnes through.

Christmas, like everything else in Jimmy Barnes’ childhood, was a bit of a mixed bag. Growing up, first in Glasgow, then in working-class Elizabeth, South Australia, he watched his parents struggle just with the everyday demands of life. “Then Christmas came along,” he says in that lovable Aussie-Scottish brogue, “and brought a whole pile of new pressures to the family.”

Jimmy remembers one year when kids he knew in the neighbourhood were getting fancy new bikes.

“So, they got me a bike,” he says. “It was this old bike – just a rusty piece of rubbish. And on Christmas Eve, I went outside and looked back in through the lounge room window, and I saw them trying to make it look like it was something decent. They painted it and then they got candles and smoked the paint to make it look jazzy.

“The next day, I had to look surprised, and I rode around the block and got wet paint and ash from the candles on me. It was really shitty, but I rode back and pretended it was the best bike I’d ever seen. I think it fell apart within a few months. But for me, seeing the two of them trying to put it together on Christmas Eve, that meant a lot, it was just nice.”

Readers of his memoirs, Working Class Boy and Working Class Man, will be familiar with Jimmy’s family. His father, Jim, “his own worst enemy”, a violent man whose anger was fuelled by alcohol, but a man who was also capable of kindness and “who didn’t want to let us down”. His mother, Dorothy, so desperate to escape the violence that she left when Jimmy was 11. His older sister, Dot, like Peter Pan’s Wendy, stepped in to raise her four siblings who were, no doubt about it, a handful.